Cristina Fernández has so far proved the naysayers wrong. How long can she stick to the policies that are about to win her a second term?.

ARGENTINA is holding a presidential election on October 23rd, but a foreign visitor could easily come and go unawares. The campaigns have put up posters, but fewer than in past contests. Cristina Fernández, who is running for a second term, rested this month to lower her blood pressure, and took more time off after her sister-in-law’s boyfriend died on October 13th. Dinner-party chatter focuses more on the Argentine Football Association’s presidential election than on the country’s.

The campaign has attracted so little interest because a first-round victory for Ms Fernández is all but sewn up. To avoid a run-off, she needs either 45% of the vote or 40% plus a ten-point lead over the runner-up. She got 50% in a national primary in August, and is now at 52% in the polls. Her top rival, Hermes Binner, has 16%. If the congressional vote shows similar results, then Ms Fernández’s wing of the Peronist party should retake the lower house and increase its Senate majority as well.

Her re-election is striking given how improbable it once seemed. She won the 2007 vote as the chosen successor of Néstor Kirchner, her husband, who did not run for a second term. But her presidency soon unravelled, as she picked fights with American investigators she accused of smearing her over a campaign-finance scandal, soyabean farmers over export taxes and the media over their coverage. Moreover, the economy slowed in 2008 in response to the world financial crisis and a drought. Her approval rating fell to 23%, and her party lost control of Congress in 2009.

But the same advantages Mr Kirchner enjoyed as president have helped his wife as well. Above all, she has had great economic luck. The price of soyabeans, Argentina’s main export, has set a series of record highs. And both the economy and currency of Brazil, the country’s chief trading partner, have taken off, creating a booming market for manufactured goods.

Her other leg up was a hapless opposition. Following Argentina’s return to democracy in 1983, power alternated between the populist Peronists and the middle-class Radicals. But the Radicals happened to hold power when the economy crashed in 2001, and voters never forgave them. Moreover, Mr Kirchner used his control of public spending to take over Peronism and sideline its centre-right faction.

That has left the opposition as a hotch-potch that can agree on nothing save their distaste for the government. Despite winning the 2009 midterms, they could not unite to stop Ms Fernández from passing legislation. One new law, which required presidential candidates to win a primary, might have encouraged the opposition to agree on one or two candidates. Instead, the challengers all formed their own parties. The field includes two conservative Peronists, one Radical, one former Radical and one Socialist who had previously allied with the Radicals. Conspicuously absent is Mauricio Macri, the strongest opposition politician, who is standing for re-election as mayor of Buenos Aires.

The third factor behind Ms Fernández’s political revival was a personal tragedy: her husband’s death from a heart attack last year. Mr Kirchner alienated voters by leading the government’s battle with farmers in 2008, and his control over the economy and Peronism undermined Ms Fernández’s leadership. But his death led Argentines to venerate him, and turned his wife into a victim. Her approval rating rose by 25 points after he died.

She has further benefited from low expectations. Argentines who feared she could not govern alone have been reassured that little has changed. Her slogans have all stressed her “strength” in the face of loss: “the strength of the future”, “the strength of the people” and “the strength of consolidation”. “Cristina may not have charisma, but she has character,” says Luis Tonelli, a political scientist. “The opposition says, ‘No you can’t’, and she can.”

Yet it would be unfair to attribute Ms Fernández’s looming victory to luck alone. Orthodox economists have long warned that Argentina’s economy was overheating. She has ignored calls to step on the brakes, instead increasing energy and transport subsidies and social spending. And her central bankers have printed pesos freely. So far she has been vindicated: during her term the economy has grown by 6.1% a year. Inflation is high, although no one knows how high. Official statistics are doctored, and private estimates are a little over 20%. But the government has kept price increases steady rather than allowing inflation to take off, and has protected household purchasing-power by expanding pensions and welfare benefits.

The president has also managed to soften her image. Much attention has been paid to her wardrobe, which has switched from flashy designer outfits to sober black attire. But she has also changed perceptions of herself as power-hungry, confrontational, distant, stubborn and haughty. “The headlines that used to make me furious now make me laugh,” she said in March. On October 17th she visited a farmers’ group, with whom she had fought in 2008, and kissed its leader’s young son. When the search for a missing girl took over the news, Ms Fernández invited her mother to the presidential palace. She has brought her children, whose privacy she once guarded fiercely, into the public eye. Twenty-year-old Florencia joined her on stage when she won the primaries, and she announced on Twitter that her son Máximo was to become a father. “God takes away from you; God gives to you,” she wrote. (The baby miscarried a few days before the primaries.) “She’s seducing the electorate by opening up her inner world to them,” says Carolina Barros, the editor of the Buenos Aires Herald.

The biggest test for Ms Fernández will be whether she can change her policies as much as she has changed her image. The government has long insisted it would not cool the economy while the “anchors” of fiscal and trade surpluses and a cheap currency remained in place. Those anchors have now been pulled up. The budget is in deficit, the current account is near zero, and the peso is overvalued. Relative to the dollar, Argentina is nearly as pricey as it was in the 1990s: Buenos Aires’ famous cafés are giving way to Starbucks with its $5 lattes, and the visa lines at the United States embassy stretch around the block.

Barring even better terms of trade, Argentina can only maintain its growth rate with yet more stimulus—which would create yet more inflation. Restaurants are already updating their prices on stickers rather than printing new menus. It is common to pay the bill with 100-peso ($24) notes, once nearly impossible to change. The government has tried to shoot the messengers. It has fined economists who publish their own inflation estimates. And many suspected its interference in April when McDonald’s slowed price increases for the Big Mac—used to calculate this newspaper’s relative-price index—and removed it from its main menu.

The long-term outlook is equally dicey. Argentina is losing $2 billion of capital a month. Although the official statistics put the investment rate at 23% of GDP, this total includes house-building, cars, air conditioners and mobile phones, as well as public works. According to Fausto Spotorno of Orlando Ferreres, a consultancy, “productive” private-sector investment has fallen from $35 billion in 2008 to $29 billion. Price controls have crushed Argentina’s domestic energy production, taking its energy-trade balance from $6 billion of net exports in 2006 to an expected $2 billion of net imports this year. Even Amado Boudou, the economy minister, says “no one should be proud” of this trend.

Ms Fernández says that Argentina is “shielded” from the global economic slowdown. If she plans to make adjustments, however, she would surely keep that quiet until after the election. For years Argentina’s economy has been “on autopilot”, says Miguel Kiguel, a former finance official. The president will soon have to take the controls—without the co-pilot she counted on for most of her career.